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suzanneshannon · 4 years ago

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Beware the Cut ‘n’ Paste Persona

This Person Does Not Exist is a website that generates human faces with a machine learning algorithm. It takes real portraits and recombines them into fake human faces. We recently scrolled past a LinkedIn post stating that this website could be useful “if you are developing a persona and looking for a photo.”

We agree: the computer-generated faces could be a great match for personas—but not for the reason you might think. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person(a) does not exist. Like the pictures, personas are artificially made. Information is taken out of natural context and recombined into an isolated snapshot that’s detached from reality.

But strangely enough, designers use personas to inspire their design for the real world.

Personas: A step back

Most designers have created, used, or come across personas at least once in their career. In their article “Personas - A Simple Introduction,” the Interaction Design Foundation defines personas as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand.” In their most complete expression, personas typically consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a certain service/product, emotions, and motivations (for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster). The purpose of personas, as stated by design agency Designit, is “to make the research relatable, [and] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of personas

Personas are popular because they make “dry” research data more relatable, more human. However, this method constrains the researcher’s data analysis in such a way that the investigated users are removed from their unique contexts. As a result, personas don’t portray key factors that make you understand their decision-making process or allow you to relate to users’ thoughts and behavior; they lack stories. You understand what the persona did, but you don’t have the background to understand why. You end up with representations of users that are actually less human.

This “decontextualization” we see in personas happens in four ways, which we’ll explain below.

Personas assume people are static

Although many companies still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests (referring to you, Myers-Briggs), here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. You act, think, and feel differently according to the situations you experience. You appear different to different people; you might act friendly to some, rough to others. And you change your mind all the time about decisions you’ve taken.

Modern psychologists agree that while people generally behave according to certain patterns, it’s actually a combination of background and environment that determines how people act and take decisions. The context—the environment, the influence of other people, your mood, the entire history that led up to a situation—determines the kind of person you are in each specific moment.

In their attempt to simplify reality, personas do not take this variability into account; they present a user as a fixed set of features. Like personality tests, personas snatch people away from real life. Even worse, people are reduced to a label and categorized as “that kind of person” with no means to exercise their innate flexibility. This practice reinforces stereotypes, lowers diversity, and doesn’t reflect reality.

Personas focus on individuals, not the environment

In the real world, you’re designing for a context, not for an individual. Each person lives in a family, a community, an ecosystem, where there are environmental, political, and social factors you need to consider. A design is never meant for a single user. Rather, you design for one or more particular contexts in which many people might use that product. Personas, however, show the user alone rather than describe how the user relates to the environment.

Would you always make the same decision over and over again? Maybe you’re a committed vegan but still decide to buy some meat when your relatives are coming over. As they depend on different situations and variables, your decisions—and behavior, opinions, and statements—are not absolute but highly contextual. The persona that “represents” you wouldn’t take into account this dependency, because it doesn’t specify the premises of your decisions. It doesn’t provide a justification of why you act the way you do. Personas enact the well-known bias called fundamental attribution error: explaining others’ behavior too much by their personality and too little by the situation.

As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, personas are usually placed in a scenario that’s a “specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve”—does that mean context actually is considered? Unfortunately, what often happens is that you take a fictional character and based on that fiction determine how this character might deal with a certain situation. This is made worse by the fact that you haven’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people your persona seeks to represent; so how could you possibly understand how they would act in new situations?

Personas are meaningless averages

As mentioned in Shlomo Goltz’s introductory article on Smashing Magazine, “a persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real individual; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people.” A well-known critique to this aspect of personas is that the average person does not exist, as per the famous example of the USA Air Force designing planes based on the average of 140 of their pilots’ physical dimensions and not a single pilot actually fitting within that average seat.

The same limitation applies to mental aspects of people. Have you ever heard a famous person say, “They took what I said out of context! They used my words, but I didn’t mean it like that.” The celebrity’s statement was reported literally, but the reporter failed to explain the context around the statement and didn’t describe the non-verbal expressions. As a result, the intended meaning was lost. You do the same when you create personas: you collect somebody’s statement (or goal, or need, or emotion), of which the meaning can only be understood if you provide its own specific context, yet report it as an isolated finding.

But personas go a step further, extracting a decontextualized finding and joining it with another decontextualized finding from somebody else. The resulting set of findings often does not make sense: it’s unclear, or even contrasting, because it lacks the underlying reasons on why and how that finding has arisen. It lacks meaning. And the persona doesn’t give you the full background of the person(s) to uncover this meaning: you would need to dive into the raw data for each single persona item to find it. What, then, is the usefulness of the persona?

The relatability of personas is deceiving

To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. To overcome this, designers invent and add “relatable” details to personas to make them resemble real individuals. Nothing captures the absurdity of this better than a sentence by the Interaction Design Foundation: “Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.” In other words, you add non-realism in an attempt to create more realism. You deliberately obscure the fact that “John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings; but wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction? If something is artificial, let’s present it as such.

It’s the finishing touch of a persona’s decontextualization: after having assumed that people’s personalities are fixed, dismissed the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers invent new context to create (their own) meaning. In doing so, as with everything they create, they introduce a host of biases. As phrased by Designit, as designers we can “contextualize [the persona] based on our reality and experience. We create connections that are familiar to us.” This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.

To do good design research, we should report the reality “as-is” and make it relatable for our audience, so everyone can use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

If we shouldn’t use personas, what should we do instead?

Designit has proposed using Mindsets instead of personas. Each Mindset is a “spectrum of attitudes and emotional responses that different people have within the same context or life experience.” It challenges designers to not get fixated on a single user’s way of being. Unfortunately, while being a step in the right direction, this proposal doesn’t take into account that people are part of an environment that determines their personality, their behavior, and, yes, their mindset. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. The question remains, what determines a certain Mindset?

Another alternative comes from Margaret P., author of the article “Kill Your Personas,” who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that consist of a range of user abilities. For example, a visual impairment could be permanent (blindness), temporary (recovery from eye surgery), or situational (screen glare). Persona spectrums are highly useful for more inclusive and context-based design, as they’re based on the understanding that the context is the pattern, not the personality. Their limitation, however, is that they have a very functional take on users that misses the relatability of a real person taken from within a spectrum.

In developing an alternative to personas, we aim to transform the standard design process to be context-based. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. So how do we identify these patterns? How do we ensure truly context-based design?

Understand real individuals in multiple contexts

Nothing is more relatable and inspiring than reality. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. We refer to this approach as Dynamic Selves.

Let’s take a look at what the approach looks like, based on an example of how one of us applied it in a recent project that researched habits of Italians around energy consumption. We drafted a design research plan aimed at investigating people’s attitudes toward energy consumption and sustainable behavior, with a focus on smart thermostats.

1. Choose the right sample

When we argue against personas, we’re often challenged with quotes such as “Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas[?]” The answer is simple: you don’t have to. You don’t need to have information about many people for your insights to be deep and meaningful.

In qualitative research, validity does not derive from quantity but from accurate sampling. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If this sample is chosen well, and you have understood the sampled people in sufficient depth, you’re able to infer how the rest of the population thinks and behaves. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys; one of each will do.

Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. Once you’ve seen her in a couple of diverse situations, you’ve understood the scheme of Susan’s response to different contexts. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.

Given that each person is representative of a part of the total population you’re researching, it becomes clear why each should be represented as an individual, as each already is an abstraction of a larger group of individuals in similar contexts. You don’t want abstractions of abstractions! These selected people need to be understood and shown in their full expression, remaining in their microcosmos—and if you want to identify patterns you can focus on identifying patterns in contexts.

Yet the question remains: how do you select a representative sample? First of all, you have to consider what’s the target audience of the product or service you are designing: it might be useful to look at the company’s goals and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a possible future target audience.

In our example project, we were designing an application for those who own a smart thermostat. In the future, everyone could have a smart thermostat in their house. Right now, though, only early adopters own one. To build a significant sample, we needed to understand the reason why these early adopters became such. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. There were those who had chosen to buy it, those who had been influenced by others to buy it, and those who had found it in their house. So we selected representatives of these three situations, from different age groups and geographical locations, with an equal balance of tech savvy and non-tech savvy participants.

2. Conduct your research

After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. This will make your qualitative data rich with anecdotes and examples. In our example project, given COVID-19 restrictions, we converted an in-house ethnographic research effort into remote family interviews, conducted from home and accompanied by diary studies.

To gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and decision-making trade-offs, the research focus was not limited to the interviewee alone but deliberately included the whole family. Each interviewee would tell a story that would then become much more lively and precise with the corrections or additional details coming from wives, husbands, children, or sometimes even pets. We also focused on the relationships with other meaningful people (such as colleagues or distant family) and all the behaviors that resulted from those relationships. This wide research focus allowed us to shape a vivid mental image of dynamic situations with multiple actors.

It’s essential that the scope of the research remains broad enough to be able to include all possible actors. Therefore, it normally works best to define broad research areas with macro questions. Interviews are best set up in a semi-structured way, where follow-up questions will dive into topics mentioned spontaneously by the interviewee. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. When we asked one of our participants how his family regulated the house temperature, he replied, “My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app—she uses WhatsApp instead. If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I am her thermostat.”

3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves

During the research analysis, you start representing each individual with multiple Dynamic Selves, each “Self” representing one of the contexts you have investigated. The core of each Dynamic Self is a quote, which comes supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that illustrate the wider context. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. In our case, as our research focused on families and their lifestyle to understand their needs for thermal regulation, the important demographics were family type, number and nature of houses owned, economic status, and technological maturity. (We also included the individual’s name and age, but they’re optional—we included them to ease the stakeholders’ transition from personas and be able to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person).

To capture exact quotes, interviews need to be video-recorded and notes need to be taken verbatim as much as possible. This is essential to the truthfulness of the several Selves of each participant. In the case of real-life ethnographic research, photos of the context and anonymized actors are essential to build realistic Selves. Ideally, these photos should come directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image will work, too, as long as it’s realistic and depicts meaningful actions that you associate with your participants. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. Therefore, we portrayed him hiking with his little daughter.

At the end of the research analysis, we displayed all of the Selves’ “cards” on a single canvas, categorized by activities. Each card displayed a situation, represented by a quote and a unique photo. All participants had multiple cards about themselves.

4. Identify design opportunities

Once you have collected all main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries, and laid them all down as Self cards, you will see patterns emerge. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.

In our example project, there was a particularly interesting insight around the concept of humidity. We realized that people don’t know what humidity is and why it is important to monitor it for health: an environment that’s too dry or too wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen existing ones. This highlighted a big opportunity for our client to educate users on this concept and become a health advisor.

Benefits of Dynamic Selves

When you use the Dynamic Selves approach in your research, you start to notice unique social relations, peculiar situations real people face and the actions that follow, and that people are surrounded by changing environments. In our thermostat project, we have come to know one of the participants, Davide, as a boyfriend, dog-lover, and tech enthusiast.

Davide is an individual we might have once reduced to a persona called “tech enthusiast.” But we can have tech enthusiasts who have families or are single, who are rich or poor. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.

Once you have understood Davide in multiple situations, and for each situation have understood in sufficient depth the underlying reasons for his behavior, you’re able to generalize how he would act in another situation. You can use your understanding of him to infer what he would think and do in the contexts (or scenarios) that you design for.

The Dynamic Selves approach aims to dismiss the conflicted dual purpose of personas—to summarize and empathize at the same time—by separating your research summary from the people you’re seeking to empathize with. This is important because our empathy for people is affected by scale: the bigger the group, the harder it is to feel empathy for others. We feel the strongest empathy for individuals we can personally relate to.

If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more inventing details to make the character more “realistic,” no more unnecessary additional bias. It’s simply how this person is in real life. In fact, in our experience, personas quickly become nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens, as we all know that these characters don’t really exist.

Another powerful benefit of the Dynamic Selves approach is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you mess up your design, someone real, a person you and the team know and have met, is going to feel the consequences. It might stop you from taking shortcuts and will remind you to conduct daily checks on your designs.

And finally, real people in their specific contexts are a better basis for anecdotal storytelling and therefore are more effective in persuasion. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving this result. It adds weight and urgency behind your design arguments: “When I met Alessandra, the conditions of her workplace struck me. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. If we go for this functionality, I’m afraid we’re going to add complexity to her life.”

Conclusion

Designit mentioned in their article on Mindsets that “design thinking tools offer a shortcut to deal with reality’s complexities, but this process of simplification can sometimes flatten out people’s lives into a few general characteristics.” Unfortunately, personas have been culprits in a crime of oversimplification. They are unsuited to represent the complex nature of our users’ decision-making processes and don’t account for the fact that humans are immersed in contexts.

Design needs simplification but not generalization. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Portray those, use them to describe the person in their multiple contexts. Both insights and people come with a context; they cannot be cut from that context because it would remove meaning.

It’s high time for design to move away from fiction, and embrace reality—in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty—as our guide and inspiration.

Beware the Cut ‘n’ Paste Persona published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

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daynamartinez22 · 4 years ago

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 324

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 324 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

We’re live. Oh, there we go. I see it now. So regardless, we’re live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today’s the 27th of January 2021. And we’ve got some good stuff for you guys today. As usual, we got a few quick announcements and then we’re gonna jump into answering your questions. But real quick, just want to say hi, looks like we got most of the guys here today. Let’s see. I’m gonna start with her Nan today. How are you doing, man?

Dude, I’m good. I’m good.

I’m just melting down here. It’s really hot and humid, but it’s okay, man.

We’re supposed to have rain tomorrow. So gonna cool off. Happy to be here.

Nice. what’s the temperature there in Celsius?

And Celsius is like 36. I think so. 36. See, it’s pretty warm. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s 96 points, 97.

All right, that’s getting up. Yeah, that’s on like, maximum temperature scale. So I know you’re a hardware guy. But yeah, some rain on top of that. That sounds nice and humid. So you enjoy that. Yeah. Awesome. Marco. How are you doing today?

Um, I mean, what can I say? Groundhog Day. If you guys understand how it is that you can take $1 and change it into a million dollars. Give me one. Give me a hill. Yeah, let me see. Fuck. I hate those cheesy markers, man. Look, hard work. You gotta work. You gotta do the dude, you got to pay your dues. It’s very people who hit on that one idea with absolutely nothing. But sweat equity. Turn it into a billion-dollar idea. The rest of Us to get to anyone, whatever. I gotta work. I don’t just sit here and do nothing. I yeah, it’s beautiful. It’s a great place to work. I step outside. It’s sunny. It’s warm. It’s beautiful. Got the sun? Got him. Got this. When did my hair look, man? Come on, man. Very few things require no work as most people tell you to should is hard work. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy, but it’s not complicated. It can’t be simplified, which is what we’ve done for you. Alright. So if you want to know how, and you want to know why we’re in the middle of our charity webinars, Bradley killed it on Monday. With his ads for branding. And entity Monday, I’m gonna call it what it is entity manipulation. It was fantastic. A lot of great ideas, a lot of information that literally I’m telling you on Monday would have cost 1000s of dollars anywhere else. You got it for free. Next Monday. What’s the Dixon Jones, internet legend Dixon Jones is coming to show you how to do entities and content. And so this is going to be a recurring theme entities entities entities, brand new entities brand. I wonder why I wonder what’s working in SEO, what has been working, what’s working out what will be working. Anyway, I don’t want to take too much time. Thank you to those of you who donated if you haven’t, then I posted a how-to on the page. I know the information is there. Again, I don’t want to take too much time. And even if you did and you did not register, you won’t be able to access that page. Now. Because that page is gone. We moved it, you can still contact the email that I’ve set on there and you will get access. If you’re given the note no donation, you will get access to the replay. And if you haven’t donated, send proof of the other donation to the email and get access guys’ information. I’m telling you, you would end up paying I know barely one time paid nearly 20 K. And the information was nowhere near as good as the shit that we give away for the price of a donation. I can guarantee it. He told us what the information that he got not that it was useless. But the information that we’re giving away for a charitable donation. I’d be dead. There’s no comparison anywhere. Guaranteed.

Outstanding Marco, something you said at the beginning. I’m just gonna ask you and for those of you watching, I didn’t ask Marco this earlier or anything. But the something you said kind of tickled something in my head. I was wondering Have you read the book The Art of contrary thinking?

Of course.

Okay. I had never heard of it until a couple of weeks ago. And I just picked it up and started going through it. And anyway, I was like, You know what, I bet this is a book Marco would recommend. And just this is a total tangent, but would you recommend people to read it because I’m like 10 pages in and I’m like, I can tell this is gonna be a big one.

I mean, I recommend that you read period, right?

Yeah, read it.

And not just that it’s not just reading that one book but this other but Well, when everybody thinks, Oh, here we go, let me see if I get the quote, right. When everybody thinks the same when everybody thinks alike, everybody is likely to be wrong. Think about that. Think about that. All right. So the art of contrary thinking, Humphrey, was a Yo, yo,

yeah, Neil.

Yeah. Yeah, guys, read the book, read the book. Go read the art of war. Mandatory, mandatory. And then read the commentaries on the art of war. Don’t just read it. Try to figure it out while you’re like trying to read the Bible without the commentaries, right? Without going into the original text. But yeah, definitely, if you can, like a book a week, by all means, for those who can’t just listen to it, listen, listen to books, all the audiobooks are everywhere. But yeah, absolutely recommended.

Awesome. All right. The library tickled something else too. I just put the link down for anyone interested. We should probably we could update this year. We’ve got a recommended reading list which I don’t think the art of country thinking is on my add that on, but I just put it at semantic mastery comm slash books. So go check that out if you’re watching and interested in some of these we’re mentioning so. Okay, sorry, a little bit of a tangent there. But last but not least, Bradley, how are you doing today?

Doing great. Busy as all hell as usual, but doing well. Glad to be here.

Sounds good. All right. Well, I got a little thing to get through here. I wanted to let people know because we do have new people watching every week people coming in on YouTube are catching the replay. So first of all, thank you for watching. You’re in the right place.

Hold on a minute. Did we forget Chris, didn’t we?

Is Chris here. Chris is here. Oh, man. I’m sorry. Well,

I can go again as well. If you don’t like me here today. Chris snuck in the back door when Adam wasn’t looking.

That’s good. I feel bad because we got the little strip up at the top and zoom. So Chris, how are you doing? Man? My bad.

Yeah, doing well here. I didn’t know.

I was wondering because now I wish the most.

Sorry, what are you saying?

I don’t know. I’m shorting the markets, especially on the SEO niche. Not having anything else. Alright, well stay away from GameStop. So that’s already? Yeah. All right, well, let’s get into it. So like I was saying, if you’re here and you’re watching live, let us know how you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a comment, just say hello, get let us know where you’re at, or how you’re doing. And if you’re new to semantic mastery, you’re new to MGYB you’re new to heavy hitters club, the best place for you to start find out how to shield your sites don’t have to worry about algorithm updates again, and it’s a free training that’s available at the SEOshield.com. That’s the word, the SEOshield.com. And you’ll hear us talking about all the stuff that’s involved in that. So if you’re not familiar with words, like SEO shield, that’s a great place for you to get started. From there, definitely recommend picking up the Battle Plan. Alright, that’s step by step processes. So you can get SEO results. And it’s how we do things and the tools we use and the services we use. And you can get that at Battle Plan dot semantic mastery.com the next one after that we also get questions about right as consultants like myself, agency owners like Bradley, people who are, you know, wanting to get more clients who want to grow the revenue, they want to scale the team, they’re still you know, grow at still in growth mode. It’s hard to get that one out of the mouth. And you know, before they’re big enough, they’re thinking, How can I do this? How do I do these three really important things so Bradley and Hernan a little bit, they’ve put together this training last year, that is just amazing? It’s called 2xyouragency, 2xyouragency.com. Just head over there and you can find out more. And for those of you who are serious about growing your digital marketing business or the digital marketing side of your business, and you want to be part of the experienced community, then the mastermind is definitely for you. And that you can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And now I mentioned MGYB if you’re not familiar with it, it’s mgyb.co. Alright, that’s done for you services, things like the SEO shield that I mentioned, syndication networks, link building press releases, and a ton more. I believe we’ve got an update coming soon. Right Marco we’ve got a kind of an overhaul on the system coming down the pipeline, right.

We have a complete overhaul of the system. But I mean, Bradley’s in there. So you can tell. He can tell me but I mean, we’re doing several things right. So it’s not just that syndication Academy. Right, that’s coming guys, that’d be an overhaul. And then, of course, we’re gonna have updates and is going to be a new person who just wants to be friendly more time, honestly, than what he could then want to get dedicated to it. It needs more time. So It can work the way that it should. Bradley couldn’t dedicate the time to it. So we just brought someone in. She learned the way. And she was here. I mean, you guys met her, you guys met SC, she’s the one that that’s redoing, syndication Academy, she was doing updates, she’s going to be going into a whole bunch of new profiles and websites that we can use to manipulate the entity. Remember, entity-based, worthless SEO. That’s what this is about the charity webinars are about that, how we’re winning today’s we’re manipulating the entity and showing Google what we want. And we’re getting Google to do what we want Google to do. That’s how we do the dope.

Outstanding. Well, like Marco was saying earlier, if you haven’t yet, you can still get access to the charity webinars highly recommend you do that that is on the page. If for some reason you’re watching this, you can’t find the link, you’re not sure what’s going on. But you know that you want to get in on that you can just send an email to support at semantic mastery comm we’ll get you sorted out and gets taken care of. So with that said, Guys, anything else before we dive into it?

All right, we’re good.

Right, grab the screen.

There it is. Alright,

so it looks like the first one is from mini min. Rob. Hey, guys, I’ve received my order from MGYB. But I don’t know how it works. Well, which order? Is he? Which order? Is he talking about? SEO SEO. But I don’t know.

Rob, if you’re here mini broad. I’m just gonna call it mini Rob. Sorry, man. This may be your actual name. But it makes me think of like a little tiny version of Rob. Yeah. If that’s the case, we need to know more information, right? We can’t tell you what’s going on. We don’t know if you ordered a press release or a link building order or keyword research. So we’re kind of stuck here. So if you let us know, we could probably help you. And then I would also say you probably want to talk to us first and come to Hump Day Hangouts. And if you’re like, maybe I should use this SEO shield thing or the press release thing. If you ask that first, we could definitely explain it. But since you’ve got it now, let us know exactly what you’re doing. And then that’s how we can help you I guess.

That’s good. Okay. All right. So yeah, we can try to answer a few. I’m sorry, I just got was looking at an email that just came in what’s the next question is what’s the best way before? Before you go to the next question, the SEO shield comm if you got an SEO shield, right, the seo.com is the place to go for the training. It’s free. And at the end of that, we even throw in a coupon for you to order whatever it is that you need.

How Do You Push The Link Juice To Power All PDFs In The Entire Amazon S3 Folders?

Beautiful. Okay, so the next one is what’s the best way to push link juice through entire Amazon s3 folders to power up all PDFs within? Also, is it possible, like Google Drive to embed folders to show all files inside the bucket? Thank you, um, the best way to power up an s3 folder? I’m not sure if you can power up a full folder. I’ve never tried that. Usually, I just extract the URLs from within the folder and then just hit those with backlinks. If there are URLs that I want to do that to Marco Do you know, can you make a public folder itself public? Like? I don’t know if the folder has its own URL or what?

Alright, guys, I have no idea. If the s3 folder itself, we know that the HTML documents that we place in their images or whatever it is that we placed in there can be made public. But I’ll tell you what, give me about I’m gonna say three months because we’re about to do some nasty stuff in s3, I was just talking about it with my team, or I shouldn’t call it my team partners. Just the SEO crew that I’m with where we’re going to go and just really look into s3 and how much power there actually is in there. So if you come back, I mean, if not just go in and do it yourself and see if it’ll if it can go public and then the best way to push power to that. The Darya Nuff said an embed gig or a link building gig or both from dedhia to that will push all the power you need. I’m not sure about the folder, but I can guarantee that in about three months. I’ll have all the answers you want about s3.

Is There A Way To Get More Branded GMBs In Different Locations To Boost The Footprint Of A Real Business With No Fixed Address?

Sweet. Next question. Is there a way to get more branded GMBs in different locations to boost the footprint of a real service business that doesn’t have a fixed address and works remotely? Yeah, I mean, if you can, I mean, there’s a couple of ways you can buy GMBs from places that will sell you verified GM bees we used to and MGYB. But I don’t think that’s available anymore. There are still some places that will do it. I even found somewhere that I placed an order but it was way back in November and it still hasn’t been delivered. So you know, I think it’s getting harder to do it. But there I know there are still some vendors out there that will sell verified GM B’s. I’m just not going to recommend any of them because again, the one that I just attempted to use in November, I still haven’t had one delivered yet. So I don’t recommend any of I don’t have any to recommend is what I’m saying but there are GMB verified. You know, you can purchase verified GMB, there are vendors out there that do sell them. The other way is the way that I’ve before people started selling them, I used to always just use Pio boxes, you can go to post offices, one thing you want to do is don’t you don’t want to get to GMBs too close to each other. Right. So if you’re going to do a service area business, which I understand doing that makes total sense, I would have them at least 15 or 20 miles apart. Depending on what your service area is, it could be even bigger, larger, you know further distance between locations. But what you can do is find a post office. And then you fill out a form, it’s free, but it’s to use the street address option. So in other words, like if you go you can do all this online, too, by the way, you can register a PO Box online. And they’ll give you they won’t issue you the box number and till you go to the post office like you have to physically go to the post office and show your IDs and sign the paperwork at the post office. But you can reserve it online and pay for it and everything else. But you do have to physically go to the post office to sign the paperwork and then they’ll assign you the box number at that point. So let’s just say it’s a box one on one. If if the post office is at 123, Main Street, whatever town right, then you can fill out an additional form, it’s free to do it doesn’t cost anything else. But you fill out an additional form to use the street address option. And then you would end up using the address for the GMB listing 123 Main Street number sign like the pound sign 101 right, and that that will work. You can’t add a p o box to GMB as the physical address. But you can do a street address with you know, basically a box number a suite number, but it’s just the pound sign and the post office is very particular about you only using the number sign the pound sign before the box number not sweet. Not box, none of that it’s just the number sign. And again, they’re very particular about that. But that’s the way that I had always done it prior to people selling GMB’s.

And it still works, you know. So that’s another alternative way to do it. And in fact, I actually still prefer that method after but over buying them except for the fact that you have to physically go to the post office that sucks. Because you know, especially if it’s far away, but if it’s within reason and you can drive to it, then I recommend going that route over purchasing GMB listings from vendors. And the reason I say that is because it’s still tied to a real physical address this way. And I feel like those are safer than using the spammed ones because of some of the spammed GMB listings that I have. They don’t have any physical location even referenced or tied to them, which I don’t even know how happens. But like there’s no physical address actually connected with it, and it causes problems with the proximity filter. So and what I’m saying is, even for service area business guys, you understand you have to clear the address like you’re not supposed to per Google’s Terms of Service, you’re not supposed to publish the street address for a service area business. Right. So in other words, if it’s a service area business where the customer or excuse me, the business serves the customer at the customer’s location, then you’re supposed to delete them or clear the physical location when you set your service areas then you’re supposed to clear the physical location from showing and when it does, it literally clears it from the GMB dashboard and it will not any longer show the physical address, the street address in the maps listing or anything. But what I’m saying is, some of the GMB is that I had purchased. They don’t have any street address associated with them at all and I don’t know how they even did it. But it causes issues to where it doesn’t show for like near me searches and stuff like that because there’s no physical location associated with it. And again, I don’t know how they do it because even when you register a new GMB, let’s say It’s a legit business and your service area business and it has a legit physical location where the office or you know the business owner lives or whatever, you have to add that address. When you set when you go to claim or create the GMB listing, you have to add the physical address and then wait for a postcard or a card to be delivered via us a mail to that location that has a pin number in it so that you can verify that that physical location that the business really resides at that physical location. So even when you clear the address to make sure that it’s not published, there is still a physical location associated with that GMB and you don’t see that on the GMB dashboard. But for example, I just recently started using local Viking to manage GMB posts and stuff because it integrates with some of my CRM and stuff. So anyway, I’m using that and when you import GMB listings into local Viking, it shows the street address, even if it’s an unpublished street address, and I’ve got a few listings in there that just no street address appears at all, there’s no physical location associated with it. And those are the ones that I’m having trouble getting to appear for proximity searches such as, like near me, keyword phrases, or search queries. And so again, I would recommend it, the spam listings, they can still work, but there are some drawbacks in them that I don’t like about them. Were the P o box way to get one with an actual physical address tends to work. Still, it still works. And I like that one better, except for the fact that you have to physically go to the post office. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Not me. Okay, moving on then.

But yeah, absolutely. That’s I mean, that’s a great way to do it for large, especially business with large service areas, if you can get multiple maps listings, that’s best. Another way to do it, by the way, just quickly, is you can go to Craigslist and post an ad for that I’ve done that I’ve been successful in the past where I’ve posted an ad and in the, you know, in the area that I want, and say, you know, tell them that I’ll pay him 50 bucks to receive a Google postcard. And, you know, tell me when they when they’ve received it and and and and, you know, call me or text me with the pin number inside the card. Most of the time what happens is you’ll find renters that do that instead of people that own homes because they don’t care if somebody registers a business to a rental property like the renters don’t care. The landlord might, but the renters don’t. So I found that I’ve done that in the past several times when it when they when I was trying to get a GMB in an area that I couldn’t that I just wasn’t you know, it wasn’t feasible to drive to and get a PO Box, then I will use Craigslist. So that’s another way to do it. Okay. Moving on.

Is It Possible To Get Wiki Links To An SEO Agency That Offers Other Services And Has A Blog On Non-Marketing Tech Resources?

Next question, given Wikipedia is a negative view of SEO, is it possible to get links from Wikipedia or wiki data to an SEO agency that also offers other services and has a blog with lots of non-marketing tech resources? Sure, but you can also purchase wiki links. Just like we were talking about spam, GMB listings you can buy. We sell [email protected], our store. And they work I mean, occasionally something will get edited out like, but I’ve actually had one recently that was edited out. And then I just submitted a support request, and I got it restored on another Wikipedia page. So you know, you can buy links, say is it possible? Yeah, cuz you can buy them. I don’t know how to do the edits myself, because I’m not a moderator for Wikipedia. But, you know, that’s one way you could do it is to hire, you know, a Wikipedia editor or moderator, I should say, those are generally really, really expensive. So the other way is just to find a service, like what we have in MGYB, where you can buy them there. I don’t know of any other way to get them to you, Marco.

I mean, there are other ways, but you got to pay for them, or you got to get yourself a Wikipedia page. And you have to be eligible, you have to be able to provide all the documentation that Wikipedia requires. That’s the best thing. The best thing is to get yourself a page on Wikipedia. And Dixon Jones is going to explain on Monday, that’s the most important Wikipedia link that you could possibly get that mentioned in Wikipedia. And then from that, I mean, the next best thing is getting a link on the top page and then getting a link on a page referring to another page as long as it’s relevant. Right. You got to maintain that relevance. But yeah, I mean, just go to MGYB to look for it. We offer it.

What Is A Good Way To Get Lots Of Footer Links Without Having Lots Of Clients?

Sweet Suraj is up he says what’s a good way to get lots of footer links without having lots of clients trying to rank in a competitive area for web design and all other competitors dominate with footer links someone’s exact text. So I’m assuming he means exact anchor text exact match anchor text was hacked footers. Yes. stuff I ever saw.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s funny. Do you say that? Because I, when I read this question earlier and asked what I was gonna suggest, was the only other way that I would know how to do it is the safe network. A lot of those links are hacked footer links, and that when I’m What I mean is like, they literally hack other people’s websites, put links in there for you. It’s so blackhat. But um, you know, it can work. I used to use a lot of safe links years ago when I was doing a lot more blackhat stuff. And I guess there’s really no hats. But when I was doing a lot of really spammy, like, you know, dark alley ship, I used a lot of safe links. I don’t do that anymore. But that’s one way to do it. I don’t recommend it. But that is one way to do it. Anyway, you got any suggestions, Margo?

For further length, Now, why? Alright, so here’s the deal. Um, and I’m gonna say this again. And we explained that I’m going to keep referring back to the webinars on Monday, we explain why we do things, the way that we do, why we create the entity, the way we the way that we do, I’m not gonna go through it here. But we become master mimics. We look at the big dogs. We do what the big dogs do, at the part level, at the algorithmic level, at the patent level, that’s how we do it. All right, if you want to learn how, and why make a donation. Go see our footer links the only way to compete or is there something more powerful than I am missing? Yeah, I mean, I, I don’t think I would go out use that strategy. I’m not I don’t think I know I would use that strategy. I would do other things. So the SEO shield? Yeah. Start there. And then there.

How Can You Run Ads For A Client If You Don’t Have Access To Their Website?

Fitz is up. He says, Hey, guys, hope everyone is well. How can you run ads for a client if you don’t have access to their website? Thanks. You don’t need access to some you can run ads to any URL. The problem is conversion tracking and remarketing and all that other stuff, you know, but you can run ads to any URL that you know. I mean, as far as I know, I don’t think if you have if, if you have a URL, you can run ads to it. The question is why, like if you don’t have access to their website, then you’re not going to be able to install, like the conversion link or code conversion tracking. You know, Google Tag Manager remarketing. You know the remarketing tag all of those things that you would need, but you don’t need them. But I would hate to piss money away on Google ads, or ads period if I couldn’t track conversions. And if I couldn’t build a remarketing list from anybody that visited the page or the site,

so I don’t know why you would want to do it without having access to the site. Go ahead.

Yeah, I’m just wondering if maybe it’s one of those where he’s saying he doesn’t have, edit access. But if somebody can, or if you can talk to the client be like, hey, you just need to take these two steps. You need to copy this code, you need to install it, tell them where to do it. Because Yeah, if you’re in that situation, where for whatever reason, you don’t have access, you need to maybe impress upon them the importance of, hey, you need to get this code on there. Otherwise, you’re gonna be losing money. You know, because you can’t retarget you’re not building retargeting lists, you won’t know about conversions.

Yeah, if you have, if you have, you know, if there’s a webmaster or somebody that is maintaining this site that you just don’t have access to yourself, then you can absolutely still do everything because what I would suggest you do at that point would be to set up Tag Manager. And then just contact, whoever’s managing the site. So the webmaster or the business owner, whoever’s managing the site, contact them and send them the container code for Tag Manager, one goes into the header, one goes into the footer, or right before the closing body tag, either one. And it’s just two snippets of code to get added to the site globally, right, so it’s site-wide code, and then you can add and subtract all the tags that you need inside of Tag Manager which you would have access to meaning you can add tags and triggers and all that stuff and then deploy it all through Tag Manager and will automatically update the website from a remote from tag managed from the Tag Manager dashboard. Once the container code is there, you can add or remove tags, remarketing tags, a conversion tracking all of that stuff. Jason, you can add structured data schema.org All kinds of stuff that you can use Tag Manager for. If you don’t have access to managing the site, the webmaster can install Tag Manager and you can use that.

Any other comments?

No, that’s fine. Okay,

Does It Make A Difference If You Already Added The Supporting Documents Prior To Getting The SEO Location Shield?

so the next one is from Landry. Now I get it, I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce your name. So I appreciate you spelling it out phonetically because Hooked on Phonics works for me. So thank you for that. So Lanre says, Hey, Bradley, I noticed you had problems pronouncing my name. It’s pronounced Landry as an rio. So I’ve got it this time. Now, my question is this, I bought my keyword research from you guys. I built my site, I added three categories with content, and five supporting articles per category, I now need to order my SEO location shield to establish my brand. Okay, I’m not sure that you want to order locations, you know, maybe you do, I don’t have the full context of your project. But let’s just assume that the SEO location showed us what you want to order? Does it make any difference? If I already added the supporting documents prior to getting the SEO location showed? I don’t quite understand the question. Does it matter that you’ve started to build out your site with categories and adding depth to the silos? No, it doesn’t matter at all. Because again, I don’t know that the location, I don’t have the full context, I don��t know what you’re doing. But just from this little bit of detail that I have. I don’t know that the location shield is really what you want and the SEO power shield should be for the brand. And then typically, for top-level silos, you want to do the are the expansion stack, right? Dry S Drive expansion, or drive stack expansion, excuse me? Not necessarily location shield. So if you go take a look at the SEO shield, and you take a look at the three different versions, what does it locate starter shield locations to power shield, right? Power shield is going to be for the brand, that’s what we recommend. But then our wireless expansions, which is a separate product in the store, it’s not on the SEO shield page, cry is drive stack expansion. Go in there. That’s what I would recommend that you buy an expansion for each top-level silo. Does that make sense? Does anybody want to comment on this Marco, do you?

Yeah, I mean, don’t look at it like that. Landry. Don’t look at it like that. You’re done with the website, you can continue working with the website. Yeah, you can have dummy content on the website, you shouldn’t. But you at least need that RSS feed. So yeah, you do need some supporting articles or posts. You have that already. Go in order and SEO shall not a location shield. Because you don’t want to pigeonhole yourself into a geographic location. All right, not if your branding, not if your branding, you can do you can take care of the locations through location-driven pages. On the inner part of the G site, in the beginning, you’re just trying to create I’m not gonna say the keyword, yet but it is its brand plus a keyword, relationships, how your brand relates to the keywords in whatever niche It is, it is that you’re in, especially the top-level keywords, we add it, we intersperse it, we go through all of the documents, everything gets filled with keywords, especially if you order our deep keyword research gig, which this is perfect for, it’s perfect for giving you all of the relevance necessary to really carry out a proper the proper content structure of your website will give you suggestions, you know your project better than we could ever hope to know it. So you have to follow what you know, with what our suggestions are. Once you have all that and once you get the SEO show delivered back, especially the G site that the following that as the ad ID and ordering an expansion won’t interfere with the ad ID. So what you see is okay, now I have a top-level category. So I’m going after gold. Now I want to do gold bars. Well, gold bars go on the inside. So let’s say you’re saying you’re in a city already, and you want the adjoining city. So gold bars add joining the city, however, it is that you choose to pursue that well, we build that for you we can build you an interface so that you don’t have to, and an intersect. So you’re expanding the power of your original branded stack, and G site. And the whole point of this is to keep expanding. So you’re adding depth and breadth to that T site and dry stack the same way that you’re doing it on your website as you find categories. And as you use supporting posts to boost that top-level category that you’re trying to rank eventually you should be pushing so much power. And I see this time and again, that even an empty folder is added. This is when true power will you push it to power and you’re building up that PageRank and ranking score. An empty folder will rank for the keyword that you’re assigning it. And it’s incredible when when when this thing happens, or you’ll pop in and like a new location, and a brand new GMB and you see all kinds of action in the GMB. And you’re wondering why? Well, it’s because you iframe it on the G site or you iframe that on your website, or it’s part of a really deep and wide drive second site. And that’s when the power really comes into play. That’s why I tell people, it’s hard work, you cannot expect to rank with one page for gold. It’s not gonna happen, you can’t ever hope to outrank Amazon with one page, and a couple of supporting posts. Not gonna happen. That’s, that’s a trillion-dollar company that you’re going after you can’t do it for a buck 50. All right, so all of this power and all of these things need to continue taking place, you need to do your press releases, you need to do the link building, you need to do the embeds plus link building. And you need to continue broadening your profile throughout the web, making that footprint bigger, wider, relating more profiles one to the other. This is what the big boys do. You see Apple everywhere you see Amazon, everywhere. So that’s what you have to do. And one of the ways that we do it is exactly the way I just described. Now that takes a lot of work. The way that I like to put this is it like people see it. And it’s really simple. I ordered the SEO shield, and then I just produce content. And magic happens. No, it doesn’t. I’ve been online for 18 years. This is 18 years in the making. Bradley has about a decade and I know her Nana’s around there. Chris has so many years and Adam, I think Well, I know. I’ve known him for six, seven years. So he has at least that long online. So you’re getting decade’s worth of thinking of strategizing of putting everything together into what you see as the SEO shoot. But that’s what it’s for. And that’s what you should order not the location shield, but the branded SEO power shield. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s why I just pulled up the pages on the store, just to demonstrate what Marco was talking about. The SEO power shield is what we recommend for the brand. For the main brand, right, and then from that, because it gives you the syndication network, the drive stack with the G site, and then the IDX page. So that’s for the main entity, right the brand itself, and then from there, you go from the store, go click into the Google RYS expansion stacks. And these are the expansion stacks of each top-level silo. Right? So each silo on the site. So top-level category, top-level keyword, you should have an RBS expansion stack. If you’re doing a local business and you’re you have location-based silos, however, you do that, I do it using the tag structure inside of WordPress, then I also order a separate expansion stack for each location, if that makes sense, but I don’t want to confuse you. As I said, if you’re doing it on just topical stuff, then you’d want a separate expansion stack for each one of your top-level silos. You don’t need additional ID pages and then additional g sites, which is what happens when you order location shield. So in fact, I would we would recommend against that.

Okay, so hopefully that clarifies that.

All right, moving on.

Does it make a difference in priority? No, no, it doesn’t, you can just as long as you have, all that you need is you need the web, the URLs, when that you’re going to push, you know uses your main target URL for your drive stack. And then for each one of your expansion stacks you’re going to get, you’re going to have a field that you have to submit your main target URL, it’s going to be one primary target URL per expansion. As long as those URLs are available, like on your site, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter whether there’s content there or anything, to begin with, you can order it with just the URL. The only thing that has to have content is the RSS feed for the SEO power shield order because the syndication network, if it’s an RSS driven syndication network as opposed to YouTube, then it needs the RSS feed has to have so the RSS Feed URL has to contain at least one item it can be the Hello World post for that matter, it doesn’t matter. As long as it has one item in the RSS feed, then they can set up the applets inside IFTTT but that’s it though the rest of the site doesn’t need to look at content on it. If it just has the URLs available in. That’s it. And for anybody watching this at this point watching the replay, enlarge the video so you can get the information about donating to the charity and accessing the webinar.

Do You Have Any Tips In Using Linktree Other Than Hammering It With Backlinks?

Okay, sweet. Let’s keep moving. Jim’s up. What’s up, Jim? He says, Hey, gang, I was curious if you guys have any tips or tricks to apply to link tree? That’s a good site. I just started playing with that a little bit more actually. Other than the usual hammer the shit out of it with backlinks. You can embed it. So yeah, it’s pretty much the same thing that we would always recommend hammer with backlinks. You can also embed link tree itself, the link tree page, which is just a collection of links, right. So that’s just you can also do embeds and backlinks to the embeds. Anything else?

Scorched earth Seo? hammer? I don’t know any other strategy. I don’t understand anything else other than if it can stand it, give it more. And if it takes that much, then try some more. Well, you know what it is man? Just go do the do.

How Would You Silo Structure A Website With Multiple Topics?

Alright, baby, what’s up, man? He says, Hey, guys, a better example for last weekend’s question how Google treat pages that are not related topically to the site, say you are a site about marketing. The silo is about software. Let’s say all the marketing software goes here. But what if we add non-marketing software pages to the silo to that silo-like employment software, or betting software, etc. So the new silo be opened to nonrelated marketing software? No. And in a case like that, BB, I would have subcategories. So I would use a complex silo structure for that type of site because the software would be the parent category, the top-level category, but then you would create subcategories for the different types of software marketing software is a subcategory. What were some of the other one’s employment software being another sub sub category, and then betting software or investing software? Right. forex software, like there’s a, you know, productivity software, like every one of those could be sub-categories. And then you would add supporting articles, which could be reviews of those types of different software in their appropriate subcategory. So in a situation like what you’re describing this time, in which you provided more context, this time than you usually do. So thank you for that, by the way, then then, yeah, I would use a complex silo structure for something like that. And I would add subcategories and appropriately place the articles and supporting articles and such within the correct cat subcategories. That is something that you could do.

Comments?

yeah, treated as a directory for marketing? And how would you build that directory then for marketing related categories and subcategories, and maybe some not so specific categories that do relate to marketing, but not in a direct manner, you could totally do that. Just be careful how far in the weeds you go, because you could end up somewhere totally not relevant to whatever it is that you’re doing. And then in that case, it’s not as if you’d be penalized or anything, it’s just that you’re not going to get any, well, you shouldn’t get any action, because the AI will know that there’s absolutely no relationship between that uncategorized or irrelevant category, and everything else that you’re doing, with the caveat that if you’re pushing enough power, it will rack it just takes monster power to do it.

Yeah. Yeah, and, and actually, you know, that’s, I, I prefer using simple silos as much as possible. But in the situation that you’re describing here, that’s perfect for a complex silo. And you can push a shit ton of power with the complex silo guys if you know how to how to set up your internal linking correctly. Complex silos can push a ton of power to the top-level keyword. So again, you know, you got to map that out before ever starting a complex silo site, spend some time mapping it out, like not just the immediate need, but your future needs as well, because that’s part of the problem with a complex silo structure is it’s real easy to get started and think that you have an idea of what you want your silo structure to look like when you’re starting off and you have, you know, a finite or a limited amount of content and ideas. But as the project grows, you’re probably going to figure like, Oh shit, I should have figured it. I should have structured the site in this way instead. And that’s part of the problem with complex silo structures is their complex just like the name? Just like, that’s why it’s in the name, excuse me. But if you do it correctly, if you map it out, right, then you can I mean, it’s just amazing. And how much power you can push with those. But again, it’s like I remember, that’s part of the reason I like to do those anymore at all is that I would spend literally hours upon hours a day to, you know, a day or two on just mapping out the site before starting the build. And even then even after doing all of that mapping work and trying to decide on how I was going to structure the site, a lot of the times, at some point in the future, I would end up kicking myself for structuring it that way, because I should have done something else, you know what I mean? So I prefer not to do that if needed. But if so, I mean, if that’s the route, that you’re going to go spend some time on the front end, you’ll, you’ll be glad that you did. And yeah, you can push a lot of power that way, for sure.

Well, that’s if you’re building a directory, this complexity in building a directory to start with. So try to keep it simple. And don’t spend hours trying to map out the site, just get to work on it, and try to work it out conceptually, as you go, you’re still gonna run into problems and having to 301 and having to redo your URL structure. But that’s a lot better, man.

Do Semantic Mastery’s Methods Only Work On Google Search Engines?

So the next question is, do your methods work only on Google search engines and YouTube? Or should they should it also work on search engines like Facebook or Pinterest search, etc. I mean, we optimize for Google? Because you know, that’s what 70 or 80% of all search traffic. I can’t speak for Facebook or Pinterest, those algorithms are totally different. But oftentimes, when we optimize for Google, then we end up ranking in Bing and Yahoo because many and Yahoo are one and the same anymore. But it’s only I think, they’ve got a little bit more market share than they used to, but it’s somewhere around 30%, I think. But I don’t optimize for Bing, or, I mean, I just optimize for Google. Because that’s, you know, that’s where the bulk of all traffic comes from. And usually, we end up ranking in Yahoo, and Bing also, comments on that?

Yeah, I mean, we want Google search. That’s what we’re after. In some places in some countries some areas, over 90% of the search market, is in Google. So if you have something that’s search-based, which is totally local business, or whatever, then it just stands to reason that you’re going to focus on Google. Now, if you’re going to go and work on the Pinterest algorithm that you have to learn the Pinterest algorithm. And some of the methods that we teach might not work in Pinterest, but I’m not gonna get into how Pinterest works here works differently. The same thing with Facebook, the Facebook algorithm works differently. It just does. They’re similar. So as the Bing algorithm, they’re all based on the same thing, right, trying to see how they rank for a certain query. At the end of the day, that’s what you’re trying to do. But you have to learn the requirements. So you mentioned Pinterest, and, and Facebook, you’d have to try those people want Amazon, we have to go in and figure that one out. Then Bing, Yahoo. Why when we can get 80 to 90%. In Google, and then the other ones, we can just run ads and get results. Yep,

I agree.

Have You Ever Ranked Something Using Citations Only?

All right. Ah, next question. Have you ever ranked something with citations only and without links? Let’s, let’s say you have a non-local site, say e-commerce does brand citations without backlinks. Will that work? First of all, I don’t know because all I do is local stuff. I’ve ranked local stuff with just citations like a local business directory or business directory citations like structured citations. Sometimes they’ll contain links, oftentimes, they’ll contain links. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to rank any local business project with just citations. It’s probably possible still, but citations are just a part of an overall picture. Now that’s talking about, like, structured citations like business directory listings for local type business sites. I think what you’re talking about is like co-citation, right? where somebody is talking or a citation, I guess, in a broader sense, can be just a brand mention, right?

I’ve never tried that. I don’t know why you would mean, I’ve never tried it. So I can’t answer that. Can you know, because the citation is a backlink? So I don’t get it. I don’t get the question to start with. And let’s, let’s see, let’s say you have a non-local site. That’s e-commerce does do brand citations without backlinks work, or will they work? I have no clue because that’s not how we do. We actually use citations as part of the entity. It’s all part of entity-based. worry less SEO, especially local, like the broader you go The less necessary they can put your branded citations if you can get them in the big ones in the data aggregators, as a matter of fact, work really well because they’re links. They’re places where Google goes to see the data to pull data, but it. Alright, so this question I’m not gonna pick on you, I’m just saying is missing the point of the ranking score and PageRank algorithm, and of every other algorithm, because Google has to go through a link somewhere to get to the server, wherever this branded or number, enter the citation or wherever this other thing is, without that link, there’s absolutely no way that Google can go from one server to the other, it’s not magic, Google cannot teleport, it can’t jump into another server, right? It’s a, it’s HTTP or HTTPS. That’s the protocol. As well, there has to be something that connects them that connect, now you what you’re talking about. And, again, I’m gonna go back to our webinar Monday, it was killer, you have two nodes, is what you’re talking about. One is your brand, whatever. And you have another note somewhere that mentioned your brand, Google has to get that get to that, each of those and relate them some way. And the way it does that is through links. So the more links that are connected to your e-commerce site, and to wherever that brand citation is, right, the more power it will have, because that Google can start creating the relationship for the distance graph algorithm with again, I’m not going to get into any of that. What I’m just saying is, you need to start conceiving in this another way, because the things that you’re asking are a little bit conceptually off on this. I’m reading this incorrectly, in which case I’d like you to explain what it is that you mean, you did a really good job on the other one of explaining what it was. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. So I said I was more contents context in that last question than what we’re used to from BB. So. Okay, so the next question is from is not really a question, as Jim says, He says, but rather a wiki experience, I have a site that has six wikilinks pointing to it from different or two different articles. I didn’t pay for them, they were added in a natural manner. So organic links. That’s awesome.

Those quotes, I’d like to know what those natural means is it’s in quotes. Well, that’s true. That’s true. But I think he means that it’s just he’s got good content, and somebody, you know, linked to it naturally from an article. That’s how I interpreted but you’re right, since it’s in quotes, it might be. Anyway, those links are very powerful. And I highly recommend trying to get one through whatever means necessary pro tip have the best, most thorough, most documented article on a subject and then cross your fingers. You know, that’s a great point, Jim, because here’s the thing. You can purchase wiki links, right? Like, we just talked about that from, or links from Wikipedia or links, you can get a link on Wikipedia by buying it from our service. But don’t just link to like something that, you know, if I recommend that you are linking to something that has some well-written content, not just like, you know, a spammy page or something like that on the site. I mean, you can try to get away with that. But the problem with that is it it’s likely going to get moderated out at some time. Like even if your link gets placed. At some point, somebody’s probably going to discover that it’s linking to something if it’s not linking to something that is resourceful, right? That is a resource that is relevant to the page that the Wikipedia that Wikipedia is linking from, then it’s going to end up being moderated out at some point, it’s almost guaranteed it’s just a matter of time. So I recommend that if you are going to buy Wikipedia links that you do link to a piece of content on the site that you’re linking to that is relevant, and has some useful information on there. Right. So that it’s less likely to get moderated out at some later date by some other Wikipedia moderator. Okay.

Comments, good?

No, no, I mean, fantastic if you can get them and I saw that later on. He said, organic. That’s fantastic. You can get organic links if you can become the source or a source for that Wikipedia page. That’s fantastic. Because now that now you have a relationship to that seed site. I’m going to talk seed sites and seed sets are I don’t want to confuse all y'all up. But that’s what happened. You related to trust to trusted and authoritative sources. Thereby you become a trusted and authoritative source. Which is why it’s working so well.

Adam, you on, you turn your camera on. So I’m assuming you got something to say?

Unknown Speaker 55:08 No, it was let’s say I’m going to reach out to Jim, I want to ask him a question because he’s had some interesting comments over the last couple of weeks. So talking about AI stuff. And then now with organic Wikipedia links, so Jim, I’m gonna track you down, are you if you can find me, so shoot me a message. But yeah, I just actually had a note on the kind of the last, or sorry, the last question of the day here.

Thoughts On The AWS Email About Allowing Public Access

Okay, cool. So, Jay says Amazon AWS sent out an email warning about allowing public access to an s3 bucket. Yeah, I’ve gotten dozens of those emails. Yeah, the wording was such that it sounds like they’re removing public access. And if you are in disagreement with that, I don’t think that’s the case. That’s not the way I read it. Yeah. And

I just pulled it up to double-check just did a quick read through. And they don’t say that they just say that. You should have some buckets configured that way, that may not be what you intended. So we suggest you fix it. And then, you know, talk to us if you have a question, but it doesn’t say that we’re gonna change it or anything like that.

Yeah. Thank you, Adam. Because that’s when I read his question. Or when I read this question, I thought about that. I was like, you know, I better go back and reread, because I mean, I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of those emails. And I’ve read through them a couple of times. And the way that I interpreted it was what Adam just said was, like, it’s telling you like, Hey, you probably didn’t mean for the bucket to have public access. But if you did, it’s not recommended. But I didn’t see anywhere where it said they were going to revert them to protect. A lot of problems.

Yeah, the only thing is one line. If you have a business need to maintain some level of public access, please see an overview of managing access, and they give references for more in-depth instructions on managing just to make sure you’ve done the correct level of access. Yeah.

Yeah, when I set up my buckets, I set them up to where objects can be public. But the folder itself, or the bucket itself isn’t entirely public, it just allows for individual items to be made public. That’s the way that I set up all my buckets so that I can pick and choose whether I want them to be public at the time that I upload the files. So hopefully, that makes sense. we’re about out of time, Jim says sorry, natural and organic. Yeah, we saw that. Thank you. Jim, by the way, reached out to Adam BB says I mean, so this is a guest clarification for his previous question. He says, I mean, you have an e-commerce site for dog food named SM doggy will a mentioned citation that way mentioned or a citation of that, and other sites will promote the site without a backlink? Again, I don’t know. I mean, for local businesses, having the name, address, and phone number published online, even without a backlink count as a citation, which is like a vote of confidence, right? It’s just because what is it doing? It’s just validating entity information. Does that make sense? That’s why it’s so important to have a name, address and phone number always published exactly the same. Because even having punctuation different or using the ampersand sign instead of A and D, or something like that, right are sometimes having IMC or LLC at the end. And other times not all of them. If you have variations of the name, address, and phone number published even with no backlink, then that can start to ambiguous. The data, right and that’s why local businesses have published mention of the name, address, and phone number, even without a backlink does count as a citation and can help to rank now, can it be can you purely rank on that? I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. But when you’re talking about that type of citation for a nonlocal site like an e-commerce site? I have zero experience with any of that whatsoever. I can’t imagine that it would but I can’t say whether it does or not. Because I’ve never done anything like that. comments.

It creates co-occurrence. It is a no co-citation or a citation. If it’s the full local citation, right? Name, Address phone number, the NA p other than that I don’t know I’d like depends on the competition. If there’s no competition, I see where it just mentioned, of your site on powerful sites would make a difference. But if like, like most places, that the competition is fierce, then no, you’re not going to get away with something like that.

Yeah, and I think it’s kind of interesting to backing this up a level away from purely the SEO benefit and saying, Well, if your name let’s say the SM dog food brand is mentioned on Huffington Post, like yeah, you know what, I bet Our website is gonna see some increased traffic and it’s not a direct link, right. It’s just by getting out there and building the brand. You know, that’s kind of what’s happening there as to how I see it without getting into the technical side.

Yeah. And you know, actually, just to follow up, Adam, that’s a really good point. And I know this to be true, because when I started my land investment, my land flipping business, I experienced it firsthand. And that is if you can get a name published online, right, and somebody but it’s not a backlink, but somebody reads the name and they’re curious, they’ll go Google that. And then it pulls up the brand. And then they click through that’s a navigational or brand search query, that then a click through. So that’s a huge SEO signal, when somebody reads a name, brand name somewhere and then goes in Google searches and then clicks through that’s a fantastic SEO signal. And I experienced that with alpha land Realty, my business, my real estate business because when I first started, I was just running ads, I didn’t do any SEO at all, nothing, I just have a single and it’s still to this day, just have a single landing page on click funnels. For you know, for that business, basically. And all I started I was sending I was running Google ads to that but no SEO and then I started sending a direct mail out to property owners with my brand name Alfa land realty on it. And what happened was I started seeing alpha land realty ranked number one for even like, my keywords like sell land fast Virginia and things like that. And I couldn’t figure out why because I hadn’t done any SEO work whatsoever. And then I started digging into it. And I realized that people were doing navigational search queries because they would get letters from me direct mail letters from me that would state you know, hey, alpha land realty wants to buy your property, if you’re interested, go here, blah, blah, blah. And they would go to Google and search alpha land Realty and then click through and because of that, I started to rank in a matter of like three weeks with zero SEO work. And it was because of those brand searches, which is why we talked about engagement signals are absolutely critical, are super powerful. You want to comment on that, guys before we wrap it up?

Yeah, I think that’s good.

Okay, thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. See ya.

Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 324 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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localwebmgmt · 4 years ago

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 324

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 324 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Dude, I’m good. I’m good.

I’m just melting down here. It’s really hot and humid, but it’s okay, man.

We’re supposed to have rain tomorrow. So gonna cool off. Happy to be here.

Nice. what’s the temperature there in Celsius?

And Celsius is like 36. I think so. 36. See, it’s pretty warm. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s 96 points, 97.

Of course.

I mean, I recommend that you read period, right?

Yeah, read it.

yeah, Neil.

Doing great. Busy as all hell as usual, but doing well. Glad to be here.

Hold on a minute. Did we forget Chris, didn’t we?

Is Chris here. Chris is here. Oh, man. I’m sorry. Well,

I can go again as well. If you don’t like me here today. Chris snuck in the back door when Adam wasn’t looking.

That’s good. I feel bad because we got the little strip up at the top and zoom. So Chris, how are you doing? Man? My bad.

Yeah, doing well here. I didn’t know.

I was wondering because now I wish the most.

Sorry, what are you saying?

All right, we’re good.

Right, grab the screen.

There it is. Alright,

How Do You Push The Link Juice To Power All PDFs In The Entire Amazon S3 Folders?

Is There A Way To Get More Branded GMBs In Different Locations To Boost The Footprint Of A Real Business With No Fixed Address?

Not me. Okay, moving on then.

Is It Possible To Get Wiki Links To An SEO Agency That Offers Other Services And Has A Blog On Non-Marketing Tech Resources?

What Is A Good Way To Get Lots Of Footer Links Without Having Lots Of Clients?

How Can You Run Ads For A Client If You Don’t Have Access To Their Website?

so I don’t know why you would want to do it without having access to the site. Go ahead.

Any other comments?

No, that’s fine. Okay,

Does It Make A Difference If You Already Added The Supporting Documents Prior To Getting The SEO Location Shield?

so the next one is from Landry. Now I get it, I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce your name. So I appreciate you spelling it out phonetically because Hooked on Phonics works for me. So thank you for that. So Lanre says, Hey, Bradley, I noticed you had problems pronouncing my name. It’s pronounced Landry as an rio. So I’ve got it this time. Now, my question is this, I bought my keyword research from you guys. I built my site, I added three categories with content, and five supporting articles per category, I now need to order my SEO location shield to establish my brand. Okay, I’m not sure that you want to order locations, you know, maybe you do, I don’t have the full context of your project. But let’s just assume that the SEO location showed us what you want to order? Does it make any difference? If I already added the supporting documents prior to getting the SEO location showed? I don’t quite understand the question. Does it matter that you’ve started to build out your site with categories and adding depth to the silos? No, it doesn’t matter at all. Because again, I don’t know that the location, I don’t have the full context, I don’t know what you’re doing. But just from this little bit of detail that I have. I don’t know that the location shield is really what you want and the SEO power shield should be for the brand. And then typically, for top-level silos, you want to do the are the expansion stack, right? Dry S Drive expansion, or drive stack expansion, excuse me? Not necessarily location shield. So if you go take a look at the SEO shield, and you take a look at the three different versions, what does it locate starter shield locations to power shield, right? Power shield is going to be for the brand, that’s what we recommend. But then our wireless expansions, which is a separate product in the store, it’s not on the SEO shield page, cry is drive stack expansion. Go in there. That’s what I would recommend that you buy an expansion for each top-level silo. Does that make sense? Does anybody want to comment on this Marco, do you?

Okay, so hopefully that clarifies that.

All right, moving on.

Do You Have Any Tips In Using Linktree Other Than Hammering It With Backlinks?

How Would You Silo Structure A Website With Multiple Topics?

Comments?

Do Semantic Mastery’s Methods Only Work On Google Search Engines?

I agree.

Have You Ever Ranked Something Using Citations Only?

Comments, good?

Adam, you on, you turn your camera on. So I’m assuming you got something to say?

Thoughts On The AWS Email About Allowing Public Access

Yeah, I think that’s good.

Okay, thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. See ya.

Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 324 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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connecticut-seo-adwords · 7 years ago

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Why Keywords Are Still So Essential for SEO

Editor’s note: This is a chapter from Search Engine Journal’s new e-book, SEO 101: Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization. Want to read the full guide? Download your copy of SEO 101 now!

Do keywords even matter to Google anymore?

The short answer: Absolutely.

The longer answer: Keep reading.

What are SEO Keywords?

SEO keywords range from singular words to complex phrases and are used in website copy to attract relevant, organic search traffic. However, keyword integration is just the start. When properly leveraged, targeted SEO keywords should be used to inspire all page content in order to satisfy searcher intent.

From a searcher’s perspective, keywords are the terms typed or spoken into a search engine. When effectively researched and optimized, keywords act as a conduit for your target audience to find the most appropriate content on your website.

But Aren’t Keywords Obsolete?

Whether you’ve heard this a few times already or your first is yet to come, “Keywords are dead” is a phrase which continues to barge its way into SEO circles. Rather than tip-toe around this recurring, binary, often-click-bait motivated assertion, let’s confront it head on.

Several developments in the SEO world have caused this claim to be stirred from hibernation, but there are four major ones that come to mind.

1. “(not provided)”

If you’re brand new to SEO, you may be surprised to know organic keywords were once easily accessible in Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, or any other analytics platform.

I’m not going to lie; it was pretty fantastic. We didn’t know how good we had it at the time.

However, things started changing in 2010 when Google began quietly taking steps to remove keyword data from our web analytics. In late 2011 through the following year, keyword data was being removed in a big way. It wouldn’t take long for the top keyword driver for every site to be ‘(not provided)’.

Once we lost our keyword data and were seemingly flying blind, many were quick to write the obituary for keywords.

But what really was different? After all, people were still searching the same and Google hadn’t changed how it was interpreting our content. We just had less visibility.

We’ve all heard, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” This is the same thing. Nothing was different; we just weren’t around.

2. Hummingbird & RankBrain

Another time the validity of keywords was challenged was when Google rebuilt its algorithm in 2013. Receiving its name for being fast and precise, Hummingbird helped Google better understand search intent, particularly with complex and conversational searches.

In 2015, Google incorporated the AI-driven ranking factor, RankBrain, into the mix to further improve its query interpretation abilities.

Before, a search for “what pizza places near me deliver?” would send Google off looking for content that matches those terms. Now, Google uses these keywords as contextual signals to learn what we really want and often rewrites our query behind the scenes (e.g., “pizza delivery 66062”).

Knowing Google often rewrites our search queries may make it seem like their usefulness is all but obsolete. But really, Google just got smarter with what we provided.

Here’s another perspective. Have you ever heard the statistic that only 7 percent of communication is through words alone? This was derived from a popular study in the late 1960s and is often used to boost the stature of nonverbal communion, diminishing that which is verbal.

Here’s a challenge for you:

Go through your entire day tomorrow without using words – no typing, saying, or signing them. At the end of the day, let me know if you felt your communication was 93 percent as effective as it normally is.

I think you can probably predict the outcome.

It’s not that the stat is wrong. There is so much more to communication (and search) than words. It is, however, often misunderstood.

The 7 percent speaks more to quantity than importance. We need that 7 percent, and we need keywords.

3. Voice Search

I love voice search. Even though it’s been around for years, I still feel like I’m in the future when Google magically captures my unintelligible stammering.

As voice search grew from being an occasionally-used novelty to a staple in our search behavior, many wondered what that meant for keywords. We all knew voice search impacted keywords, but did it kill them?

Between us (subconsciously) picking up on Google’s heightened interpretation skills and our communication tendencies when talking versus typing, we have become very conversational and detailed searchers.

So, while it’s been a huge win for searchers, it’s posed challenges to SEO professionals. For instance, it’s hard to know which keywords to keep an eye on if a significant chunk of traffic is driven by those that had rarely, if ever, been searched before.

But this goes back to the “(not provided)” argument. Just because our tracking is imperfect doesn’t mean the significance of keywords lessens in any way.

We Omit Important Keywords

Did you know through voice search you can find out when Scarlett Johansson’s first album was released from a query that doesn’t include her name or the name of her album? (Side note: Did you know Scarlett Johansson had an album?)

So, do keywords actually matter if you can leave out crucial bits and still get what you want? Of course! This just forces us to step back and look at the bigger picture, rather than examine each individual search in a vacuum.

4. Google Planner Grouped Keyword Volumes

Starting in 2014 and kicking things up a notch two years later, Google’s Keyword Planner tool began grouping volumes for similar terms. Instead of showing keyword A gets searched 100 times per month and keyword A1 gets searched 50 times per month, both would show 150. Google said the reason for this to make sure “you don’t miss out on potential customers” and to “maximize the potential for your ads to show on relevant searches.”

That explanation certainly implies searcher intent doesn’t vary much between closely related terms.

Ultimately, Keyword Planner is a PPC tool. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand how forcing PPC bidders to expand their keyword targeting could be a financially-motivated decision.

Why are Keywords so Important to SEO?

We know keywords are alive and well, but why are they so critical to SEO?

Keywords are Clues

The importance of keywords in SEO is in part due to their importance outside of it.

Forget about keywords, rankings, traffic, or even your website for a minute.

If you knew your customers’ true feelings, how would you operate your business differently? How valuable would those insights be to you?

In his book, “Everybody Lies”, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shares his findings of what search behavior tells about human psychology. When in a focus group, taking a survey or responding to something on Twitter, we all tend to let our answers be impacted by how others may perceive them.

What about when we’re searching? The combination of anonymity and immediate access to a wealth of information paves the way for an unadulterated look into what we truly want.

It’s data-driven truth serum.

At its core, keyword research is a powerful market research tool that can be leveraged in many different ways, not just informing website content. To get the most out of keywords, you have to look beyond the explicit, literal translation and also pick up on the implicit clues to gain the true intent of each keyword.

As an example, let’s look at the query, “safest baby cribs”.

safest baby cribs 2017Explicit informationImplicit informationconcerned about safetylikely first-time parentswants more than one crib to choose fromwants to know what makes cribs safe/unsafelooking for article published in 2017understands safety standards change over timein research phase with future intent to buypossibly in process of buying other items for nurserysafety may be more important than cost or aestheticslikely looking for a list of cribs ranked by safety measure

Keywords are Like Personas

Personas act as bullseyes. They aren’t all we’re after but by aiming for them, we’re setting ourselves up for success.

It’s not as if I only want to market to 54-year old women named Betty who have a 401k and are soon to be empty nesters. But that level of granularity and focus helps ensure I’m attracting the right group of people.

Conversely, if you have no focus and try to appeal to everyone, you will likely come away empty-handed. It’s a beautiful paradox, really – the exclusivity of your target audience often is directly related to the size of your actual audience, and vice versa.

It’s the same with keywords. A quick peek into Google Search Console’s search query data will tell you it’s never just about one keyword. However, having a primary keyword target for each page will give you the right direction and perspective to capture the right audience from a plethora of related searches.

How do You Choose the Right Keywords?

This topic could live in a post on its own, which it has many, many times. Here are some of my recent favorites:

While I highly suggest researching and experimenting with this topic in great detail if you’re serious about honing your craft, here’s a quick introduction to selecting the best keywords for SEO.

Don’t start with keywords: Before you put on your SEO hat or even your marketing hat, just be human. Learn about your customers from your customers. Before diving into tools and spreadsheets, try to gain some real empathy and understanding for the customers you’re serving and the perspectives they hold.

Build a seed list: Using what you gained in step one, along with what you know about where your customers’ needs and your business’ solutions intersect, brainstorm an initial list of words and phrases that effectively describe your core offerings.

Gather current keyword data (if your site already exists): Generate a list of what is currently (and nearly) driving traffic to your site using Google Search Console click data and any ranking data you have.

Group terms by search intent: Categorize your keywords in a way that will be simple and useful for you and anyone else who might look through them. This can be done by audience-type, phase of the funnel, or any other way that makes sense to you.

Map keywords to content: Choose 1-4 primary keywords to target on each page based on a careful balance between keyword difficulty, relevance, and search volume (taking organic SERP visibility into account). Once those are determined, find semantically-related and long-tail modifying terms to help support your primary keywords.

Do it all over again: Once your keyword strategy has been implemented, Google has had time to react and you’ve been able to collect enough data, rinse and repeat. They don’t call it search engine optimization for nothing.

What are the Most Common SEO Keyword Types?

Keywords can be categorized and tagged in multiple ways for a variety of reasons. Here are the most common types and examples of SEO keywords.

Branded vs. Unbranded

Branded search terms contain the brand in the query. This could include the official brand names, misspellings, branded acronyms, branded campaign names or taglines, parent companies, or anything else with obvious branded search intent.

Unbranded, or non-branded, terms are all other keywords you may consider. Unbranded terms often describe the customer problem or your business offering.

Some businesses have non-distinct names that can make this delineation more difficult. For instance, is a search for “Kansas City Zoo” branded or unbranded when the name of the zoo is… Kansas City Zoo?

Branded terms generally bring in the highest converting traffic because the searcher already has a certain level of brand familiarity and (often) affinity.

Branded: Houston Rockets

Unbranded: the unequivocal greatest basketball organization of all time

Seed vs. Page-specific Keywords

Seed words are the obvious, initial list of words you start with in the keyword research process. They act as the seeds you “plant” to grow your list.

Seed words are often relevant to most of your website, if not all of it. Page-specific keywords are generally found later in the keyword research process and are applicable to only a single page or set of pages.

Seed: home improvement store

Page-specific: deck building supplies

Long-tail vs. Head Terms

Those with the highest search demand are called head terms. Conversely, those with a relatively low demand are considered long-tail.

Why? When you graph them out, head terms fall off quickly in terms of the total number of keywords, whereas lesser searched terms seem to go on forever like a tail.

The middle of the graph is often aptly named “middle” or “chunky middle” (or torso). With 15 percent of searches being new to Google each day, it shouldn’t be surprising that most search queries are considered long-tail, even if each individual long-tail query gets searched very few times.

Head terms and long-tail terms tend to have the following contrasting characteristics. However, besides volume, none of these are absolute.

HeadLong-tailHigh search volumeLow search volumeHigh ranking competitionLow ranking competitionLow converting trafficHigh converting trafficFew wordsMany wordsBest for top-level pagesBest for lower-level pagesMultiple search intentsSingular search intent

Head: Bob Dylan

Long-tail: Who is Jakob Dylan’s father?

Primary vs. Secondary Keywords

Also labeled “targeted” or “focus”, primary keywords are used to describe your most important keywords. These terms can be used in the context of your entire site or a single page.

Secondary (also called “tertiary” or “supporting”) keywords include all other keywords you are targeting and/or incorporating. In some contexts, secondary terms are those you are loosely optimizing for, but they’re just not considered a high priority. In other scenarios, secondary keywords act as the semantic or long-tail support to help you get the most out of your primary keyword targeting.

Examples for a subscription shaving kit product page:

Primary: shaving kit subscription

Secondary: monthly, razors, free trial, custom

Step, Stage, or Phase

SEOs often recommend categorizing your keywords according to a marketing funnel or customer journey. This can help ensure you are targeting customers at each critical point.

Some sets of categories have the brand in the center (e.g., awareness, consideration, conversion, retention) while others are more customer-centric (e.g., unaware, problem aware, solution aware, brand aware). Similarly, some simply determine the action-oriented mindset of the consumer (e.g., navigational, informational, transactional).

Awareness: 30th birthday party ideas

Consideration: Las Vegas travel reviews

Conversion: flight and hotel packages to Las Vegas

Retention: Mandalay Bay loyalty program

Local vs. Global Keywords

Depending on its usage, a local keyword can mean one of two things:

The searcher is looking for something geographically nearby:This can be very straightforward like “library near me” or “2-bedroom rentals in Phoenix”, or it could be more subtle like “restaurants” or “What time does Whataburger close?”.

The searcher has a high probability of being in a certain area: For instance, “Why did Oklahoma Joe’s change their name?” could be considered a local term because there’s a good chance the searcher is from Kansas or Missouri. Why? Those are the only two states where this exceptional barbecue establishment calls home. By the way, it is now called Joe’s Kansas City BBQ if you ever happen to be coming through town.

Local: 2-bedroom rentals in Phoenix

Global: Is renters insurance worth it?

Audience Type

Rarely does someone self-identify themselves in a search.

When’s the last time you started a search with “I’m an XX year-old, college-educated digital marketer looking for [rest of your search]”? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this has never happened.

However, the ‘who’ behind the searcher can often be found in the implicit information of the query.

While almost no queries are exclusively searched by one group, many heavily skew towards a single audience.

One of the best ways to find out who is searching for a term is Google it and look at the results. Then ask yourself who the top results seem to be talking to.

If Google’s job is to give a searcher what they want, then the target audience for the top results of a query should be the same audience who completed the query.

Patient: Is diabetes hereditary? Doctor: T2DM treatment algorithm

Evergreen vs. Topical

Evergreen keywords have steady search volume with little variance over time. On the other hand, topical keywords are either seasonal (e.g., valentine’s day gift ideas), flashes in the pan (e.g., covfefe), or consistently relevant (e.g., Taylor Swift).

Some evergreen keywords can switch to being topical when an event makes them culturally relevant, like searches for a celebrity immediately after their unexpected death or a city when it’s hosting the World Cup. Google often favors new content for topical keywords because the “query deserves freshness”.

People like to create evergreen content because it can be a low investment relative to the long-term value it produces. However, the competition and initial cost are often steep. Conversely, topical content is attractive because it has a lower cost of entry, weaker competition, and provides immediate value – but that value has a short shelf life.

Evergreen: how to know if you’re pregnant

Topical: movie showtimes this weekend

Keywords vs. Carewords

For the first time since we moved in four years ago, we decided to pay to get our house cleaned. Our searches were very much based in logic:

What’s the cost for how much work?

Do they use natural products?

Did they get good reviews?

Are they flexible on timing?

However, how the companies made us feel certainly played a key role, even if it was mostly subconscious. In this instance, content that made me reflect on all the time I was going to save, how this would be one less thing I had to stress about, even the smell of a fresh house when I walked in the door – likely played a role in my final decision.

Sara Howard describes carewords using an example of buying a car. Would you include “reliable warranty” in a search for a new vehicle? Probably not. Do you want to know the warranty is reliable once you’re on the page? Absolutely.

In short, carewords are low-to-no-traffic-generating terms that increase on-site engagement and conversions for existing traffic.

Keywords: wet bar ideas for basement

Care words: wine enthusiast, ample storage, simple, hosting, durable, man cave

How do You Optimize Your Website for Keywords?

Much like choosing keywords, effectively optimizing your website for keywords could live on its own blog post. However, here are a few tips to get started.

Where to Incorporate Keywords on a Webpage

URLs: URLs rarely change, are highly visible and describe the entire page. For those reasons, Google places some value in what they say.

Static content: Search engines are getting much better at crawling dynamic content. Static content is a near-guarantee for indexation.

Title tags: Title tags influence rankings and click-through-rate (CTR) and if written effectively, keywords can help with both.

Meta description tags: Unlike title tags, meta descriptions do not influence rankings in Google. However, including them can increase CTR.

Most visible content: Google’s job is to understand content the way we do. An H1 tag at the top of the page gets far more eyeballs than boilerplate content at the bottom. Whether it’s a heading tag, early body copy or a bolded phrase, the most visible content is generally the most influential for SEO.

Image and video file names: Instead of letting your phone give your image or video a default name that usually contains something random and nonsensical, give it a descriptive name using a relevant keyword.

Image alt attributes: Alt tags not only make your site more inclusive for your visually impaired audience, they give Google a better idea of your picture. Incorporate keywords when appropriate.

Image title attributes: Image titles don’t work on all browsers the same way, which is why Google may not put much weight into this content. However, if there is an opportunity to gracefully include keywords, go for it.

Video closed captioning and/or transcripts: Some videos contain extremely relevant keywords but Google has no clue. Make sure what is heard and seen gets included in your indexable closed captioning or transcript.

Schema markup: Schema helps add context to content. When applicable, mark your keywords up with the most appropriate schema properties to remove some of the guesswork for Google.

Keyword integration tips

Ignore the meta keywords tag: The meta keywords tag gets little, if any, attention from the main search engines. Don’t waste your time here.

Test everything: If you have the opportunity to work on sites with a massive number of pages, you have a perfect opportunity to set up some worthwhile tests to polish your techniques.

When Won’t Keywords Matter?

How do we know keywords will always matter? In reality, there’s no way to know, but many of the root arguments shared in this guide have been the same for over 20 years, and they show no signs of pivoting.

With that said, I do think I can tell you the next time “keywords are dead” will ferociously bounce around the SEO echo chambers. Larry Page doesn’t just want Google to be at the level of a human, he wants it to be superhuman.

The introduction of Google Now has given us a glimpse of what is to come: Google searching for what we want without us having to ask.

If Google does our searching for us, would keywords still matter? Yes, but that’s for another time.

Source

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/why-keywords-important-seo/

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